Nov 28, 2011

Twelve hours from now, twelve years of education

will come to a conclusion.

Farewell, English Language & Linguistics. I'll miss studying Singlish (optional marking for plurality, optional tense marking, omission of articles and 'be', the passive 'kena', the perfective 'already', discourse particles at the end of sentences...) and Afro-American Vernacular English (invariant form of 'be', [d] voiced stop in place of initial [ð], non-standard subject-verb agreement) (oh the opacity of the language of linguistics with all its technical jargon) and my favourite,Inglan Is A Bitch.(CHECK OUT THE LYRICS. IT'S ENGLISH. REALLY.) Descriptivism desrciptivism. And watching a video about the study of swearing in British schools. And Ted & Ralph.

95% of New Zealanders are monolingual in English. China introduced compulsory English lessons for all students starting from third grade, but a few poorly-resourced, mostly rural schools were exempted. David Deterding has written extensively on the various linguistic features of Singlish. (poor guy.) BBC introduced an audio- and SMS-based English learning program called Janala in Bangladesh at just 4 US cents per lesson to help reduce inequality and help make up for the shortage of English teachers. South Korean parents fight to get their children places in English-speaking kindergarten centres even though they cost twice as much, and wealthy parents send their children overseas to learn English. (Seokhoon, Hyun and Park, HAHAHA)